Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/66

58 out any reference to a system C and its determination by recurrent vital series, is a decision which lies outside the present undertaking. I am disposed to believe that the results which Avenarius finally reached were won partly by means of his symbol. When we have all three groups, the concepts, the phenomena of experience and the final conclusions and statements, we can, perhaps, say that the latter group needed only the group of experience-facts to produce it. But if a group of concepts are of assistance of any sort in reaching conclusions, the concepts have served their purpose, whatever critics may think of them.

The efforts of Kirchhoff, of Herz, and I may say of Avenarius, show the effort to eliminate explanation from science as an ultimate goal, and to limit its task to description which shall be as simple and as complete as possible. But from this point of view it is not pretended that science is a statement of nature's eternal truths, and, as Kleinpeter observes, it follows that there is for humanity 'no objective truth enthroned above gods and men, as the ancient Greeks imagined.'

We admit readily the wisdom of this point of view, and yet some of us are sure to feel not quite satisfied. Science does well indeed to get rid of metaphysics, to accept its method as method and not as revelation. Yet a Veritas there must be, we say, and by what right does science forbid us to seek it because she seeks something else?

If we look for the essentially logical distinction between the two points of view above indicated, between that which seeks a knowledge of ultimate causes, and that which seeks complete and economical descriptions, we observe that it is in the existential judgment, which is present in the older point of view, while absent in the later one. It is evident, also, that the older point of view, therefore, is a metaphysical point of view. The great role which materialism played thirty and forty years ago was an inevitable result of the great triumphs of physical science, when physicists defined the goal of their science as metaphysical insight, insight into the eternal laws of the movements of matter of which all change in the world is the resulting effect.

It is no doubt more intelligent to recognize science as the effort to describe experience rather than to try to regard it as explaining experience in any ultimate sense. Yet many will feel that the older point of view had a more substantial purpose than the new one. It at least was seeking the Veritas which must exist. We might not like materialism, but the science of that faith was a courageous science not afraid of the truth wherever it might be found.